Those opposed to nuclear power have long raised doubts over its safety. Often raised is the question, "what would happen if major earthquake struck one?" Would a radioactivity release endanger millions?

This morning, we got a chance to find out. A 6.8 earthquake struck northern Japan, almost directly underneath the massive Kashiwazaki-Kariwa Plant, responsible for a third of the Japanese residential electricity supply. The quake leveled hundreds of homes, left fissures 3 feet wide in the ground, and swayed buildings in Tokyo, 300 km away.

What happened at the plant itself? An electrical transformer caught fire and was quickly extinguished. And a tiny amount of mildly radioactive water was released -- one billionth of the safe amount allowed under under Japanese law, or 1/1,000,000 of what is generated from a single dental x-ray. Not even the workers actually inside the reactor were exposed to a dangerous dose, much less the general public. All reactors were shut down for inspection purposes, and initial reports indicate no damage or safety issues.

And that's it. Nothing to see here folks, move along.

The western world's nuclear safety record remains unbroken. Over five decades and thousands of reactor-years later, not one person has ever been harmed by commercial power generation. Nuclear power generates no greenhouse gases, and operating costs continue to drop, reaching a level of 1.66 cents per kilowatt-hour in 2006 -- one twentieth the cost of solar power. Despite all this, the U.S. and most of Europe continue to shy away from nuclear power, and pursue pie-in-the-sky energy approaches that, even if they eventually become feasible, will remain forever more expensive to operate.

The West may be ignoring nuclear power, but others are not. Last year, China announced plans to build 30 new reactors, in a bid to reduce air pollution and provide cheap power for its burgeoning economy.

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> "but it is pretty clear that plenty of people have died due to accidents in nuclear power plants. (link snip)"

There have been no deaths in western civilian nuclear power plants. I'm not sure if you read that link, but it doesn't detail any. There have been two fatal accidents in Western research reactors (one listed in that link, one not), but these were not commercial power plants generating electricity. The track record is indeed perfect.

Soviet-bloc nations have a different record, obviously. But separating them out is not a false distinction. Besides the vastly differing levels of maintenance, training, and safety factors, there is the overriding point that they utilize RBMK reactors. These graphite-moderated reactors are inherently subject to runaway effects. The reactors used everywhere else in the world are light- and heavy-water moderated, and immune to the problems of the RBMK design.

The distinction you make is useful to characterize the superiority of the Western-style reactors, but it is not appropriate, IMO, to discuss in the general context of nuclear power safety. This is because it leaves the false impression that power plants are perfectly safe, when the reality is that they are potentially quite dangerous.

> "it is not appropriate, IMO, to discuss in the general context of nuclear power safety"

Its appropriate to non-Soviet nuclear power safety, as RBMK-style reactors do not exist in this context. The two designs are wholly different, and calling "nuclear power" dangerous due to these reactors is like calling a green bean poisonous simple because Castor beans are.

Energy production is always 'potentially' dangerous. But nuclear power is, by far, the safest form of power generation ever invented. If you look at the safety record of the coal, oil, natural gas, or even hydro or solar-- people have been killed, and the overall safety factor is lower.

Just to add some numbers to that, there have been 31 people known to have been killed from wind power. Mostly these have been people installing or doing maintenance on the turbines, however they also include a skydiver that landed on a turbine and a crop-duster pilot that was killed when his aircraft hit a guy-wire for a wind farm meteorological station.

Depending on what estimate for number of deaths from the Chernobyl accident (which range from the 41 known deaths to as much as 200,000 if you take Greenpeace's figures), the numbers may be quite close in terms of deaths/TWh. ie if wind power was as widespread as nuclear we could expect about as many people to be killed by wind power as by nuke power INCLUDING Russian-style reactors with the Chernobyl accident.

Hydro power and coal power both come out MUCH worse then nukes or wind power in this regard. Hydro power has by far the highest number of deaths/TWh from accidents (the bulk of which have happened in China) while pollution coal power is known to be killing many tens of thousands every year just through regular use. A recent report gave a very rough estimate of over 400,000 deaths/year in China for coal power plant pollution, while North American numbers are usually in the 5,000-30,000 deaths/year.

I'd feel much safer living next to a wind farm than a nuclear power plant. At least with a wind turbine, the worst that could happen is that it comes loose and smashes up a couple of houses. With nuclear power plants, although there hasn't been a major disaster yet (Lets forget about Chernobyl, it's obviously not important at all) there is a POTENTIAL for a terrible disaster. Unlike fire (worst thing which could happen from, say, a coal power plant), radioactivity is much scarier IMO because it can't be seen, smelt etc. Sorry if this sounds really obvious, but I'm tired and for some reason everybody here seems to be forgetting how scary radioactivity is.

I can cope with a power plant setting on fire, exploding or even a freak wind blade cutting me in half, but radioactivity is something I find disturbing, especially with all of the long term risks.

When people say that Nuclear Power plants are clean, does this include the waste? What happens to that? Do we really expect nothing to go wrong for the next 10,000 years whilst the half life takes effect?

Has anybody else heard of the possible risk of Japan sinking? *sleeps*

quote: Sorry if this sounds really obvious, but I'm tired and for some reason everybody here seems to be forgetting how scary radioactivity is

Scary to those people who don't know anything about it. To those who realize we live in a constant bath of radiation daily, its not.

Do you know that bananas commonly set off the radiation monitors at US ports, designed to detect terrorists smuggling in nuclear material? Do you know that living in a Rocky Mountain state means you have a few thousand pounds of nuclear waste in your own backyard-- waste left over from when Mother Nature created the planet. Do you know how much radiation you're exposed to every time you take a plane flight? Or visit a city more than a few thousand feet above sea level?

Live next to a coal plant and the plant could potentially explode, incinerating you instantly. Live next to a hydro plant and the dam could burst, drowning you and all your neighbors without warning. Live next to a windfarm and a massive turbine can break loose in high winds, destroying your entire house.

Whats the worst that can happen for a modern nuclear reactor? A billion-to-one chance of a meltdown, which would force you to evacuate. If you were slow about it, you'd be at a slightly elevated risk for certain types of cancer. I'll take that over instant-death anytime, especially when the odds against it happening are so incredibly low.

I'd rather take instant death over slow and painful death any day of the week.

Please don't patronise me, as I believe that I do know a thing or two about radioactivity. I guess I'm going to be rated down because I've got a different opinion to everybody elses, but surely with so many civilian accidents with radiation (All of which contain but a fraction of the amount of radioactive material found in a power plant), it is possible for something to go disastrously wrong with a nuclear powerplant? Sure, it's unlikely, but with so many over the world, it can only be a matter of time.

I like in Cornwall in the UK. We have a lot of granite rock around and need special fans extracting the radon gas from underneath our houses. It might just be me, but through out my entire life I haven't cared if something happens naturally- it can't be avoided. However, when people are playing around with nuclear power plants and causing radiation which shouldn't be around, I believe that it's a problem we could avoid. What about all of the waste from these plants? Do you honestly expect it to be stored safely for thousands of years?

--> "it is possible for something to go disastrously wrong with a nuclear powerplant? ...it can only be a matter of time"

Thats true for everything in life. If you wait long enough, eventually something will go wrong....or barring that, till a meteor ends all life on the planet. The question is HOW LONG?

Risk studies done on 1970s-era nuclear power industry put the probability of major accidents at one every 10,000 years. There are newer designs safer by a factor of 100X, but lets ignore those. If we built 10 times as many of those old-style plants, we could expect an accident every thousand years. But how many people would die from coal, hydro, wind, or solar power in that time? A thousand times as many. Nothing is 100% safe in life. But nuclear power is SAFER than all the alternatives.

So you don't care if you die from natural radiation, only the manmade variety? You're right, most people won't agree with you. It seems you don't even care if you're sliced into bits by a windmill, being incinerated by a gas explosion, or even getting cancer from the toxic materials generated by solar cell manufacture. You just don't like nuclear power, period, and you're willing to stand up against it, no matter how many people that means die as a result.

--> "What about all of the waste from these plants? Do you honestly expect it to be stored safely "

Waste is a nonissue, used to drum up fear to stop nuclear power. A normal reactor generates only couple cubic meters of high level waste per year, waste that we could easily reprocess right back into into fuel. There's more low-level waste. But that just isn' that dangerous. You could just disperse it in the ocean. Even 10,000 years worth of that waste wouldn't even be enough to detect in the sea, given all all the natural radioactive elements already in there. If you don't want to do that, just glassify it and store it somewhere dry.

By the way, did you know coal plants release more radioactivity than nuclear ones? They burn vast amounts of coal, which releases about half a kilo of uranium vapor into the air each and every day.

"it is possible for something to go disastrously wrong with a nuclear powerplant? ...it can only be a matter of time"

But nuclear powerplants can go more disasterously wrong than any other power plant that I can think of. I'd like to see a windfarm cause as much commotion as Chernobyl did ;)

As for 1 major disaster every 10,000 years... how long have we had nuclear powerplants? 30 years? How many accidents have there been? Chernobyl and 3 mile island? At least if your theory of 1 in 10,000 years holds up, it'll be at least another 20,000 years before the next accident.

'So you don't care if you die from natural radiation, only the manmade variety' - Not so much manmade, but AVOIDABLE radiation. If I die because I climb up a granite cliff, I'd probably think along the lines of 'hmmm, that was very unlucky!' but if I die because, say, a nuclear powerplant explodes, I'd think 'That could have been avoided'. You get the gist of it.

Can you honestly say that nuclear is safer than solar and wind turbines? Is it actually possible for a disaster which kills more than a couple of people with these sources of power? Sure, somebody might slip from the top of a wind farm or get crushed by a solar panel, but at least it's a nice, quick death. And it's their fault for being in such close proximity in the first place.

'There's more low-level waste'

HLW accounts for over 95% of the total radioactivity produced in the process of nuclear electricity generation. - Wikipedia.